About teaching and training Eskrima and Bagua. Recommended seminars, and related material I find interesting.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Tough Sell?

I was talking with a painting client today, a psychotherapist, and she asked me about my view of martial arts.
We talked about why people train, what I have personally gotten out of it, and how I pass the gift I feel I got from my teachers forward.
I think at some point I said something about how odd it is to have discovered so much cool 'life stuff' from practicing an out-of-context, esoteric, dueling art, and being the good listener and questioner she is, she managed to pin me down to a simple observation about why this practice is not more popular in the general community, seeing as my experience was so illuminating.
There are many reasons of course, but it basically boils down to this -

- It is hard to sell the goal of being comfortable in chaos and the ability to surf uncertainty when most people are looking for definitive answers and absolute certainty.

The gift I got, and how I teach now, is not a method that ends with the presentation of an ornate box of wisdom, with fear squashed into a tiny space beneath, it is a trip to a never ending masquerade ball where fear and ego are the dance partners ....

And there are swords ... lots of them ....

See, that sounds like fun to me .... but apparently this is not a view shared by the many ..

I rather think that there is an international social sorting process taking place right now. Eventually we will have a choice to live in cities called things like Clarity-ville, Certainty-city, Total Ambiguity-town, and Chaos County. In that last one I hear the little girls will keep razor blades in their ballet slippers.

I've come across this inside and outside of martial arts. Reality is unpredictable and uncertain where it really counts. ("Fooled By Randomness" is an excellent book on this, as it "The Black Swan".) But people don't want to hear that. They don't want to live with that uncertainty. They don't want to be "afraid".

As you said about what you teach, it is a place "where fear and ego are the dance partners". Most people would rather not know and/or experience the truth. And often times, when they get hit in the face with it (metaphorically, and sometimes literally), it hurts even more.